AMD Tech Day: Morning Sessions [Archive]

Jason Dunn

07-01-2008, 03:00 PM

<img alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1212550636.usr1.png" /> This is one of the quickest trips I've made for a technology event, but when given the invitation I was keen to go – I hadn't really heard, first hand, what AMD had been working on since January of 2007. With the recent announcement of their Puma platform, I was eager to learn more about what they brought to the table with their new technologies. Full disclosure: my flight and hotel were paid for by AMD (and so was a big ol' Texas BBQ dinner detailed later). Equally full disclosure: having so many tech-heavy sessions in one day was like drinking from a fire hose (to quote one attendee), so while I've tried to be as accurate as possible in this article, it's possible I may have gotten some of the details incorrect. Without further ado, let's jump in! <MORE /> AMD Tech Day I flew from Calgary to Houston, then Houston to Austin, getting to the hotel (a classy place called <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mansionatjudgeshill.com/">The Mansion at Judges Hill</a>) around 10 PM. The next morning, bright and early, all 13 attendees got on a bus and we headed to AMD's headquarters. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214883968.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 1: AMD's new headquarters in Austin are brand-spanking new...when we were visiting they were still doing some internal construction and painting. The grounds and building designs are beautiful. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214883988.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 2: All aboard the good ship AMD! <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214884136.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 3: Look mom, I'm a VIP! I had to give the badge back at the end of the day, although <a target="_blank" href="http://www.geardiary.com/2008/06/25/amd-tech-day-first-half/">some people</a> just smiled and walked through the exit door and kept their badges. Tsk tsk. ;-) <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214884738.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 4: AMD's Chis Cloran kicked off the day. The opening remarks by Chris Cloran, Corporate VP of Product Marketing, focused on the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/89410/amd-unveils-turion-x2-ultra-and-amd-turion-x2-mobile-processor-platform.html">recent Puma platform launch</a> – he emphasized that the success of the Puma launch was largely due to AMD and ATI working together effectively to create a platform that leveraged the strengths of both groups. There are 110 "design wins" coming to market from various partners – and a design win is defined as a platform, which is another way of saying a particular model of laptop. Each model of laptop will typically have an average of four versions, so in the coming months we should be seeing somewhere around 400 Puma-based laptops being released by AMD's partners. Impressive! Pat Moorhead, VP of Advance Marketing, took the floor next and gave us a bit about his background – he loves consumer technologies, and he talked about the terabytes of storage he has in his home, the UMPCs that he uses, and basically what a complete geek he was – which made him instantly understood by all the attendees in the room. <PAGE /> Diving Deep on Puma David Rooney, Product Marketing Manager for AMD Notebook Product Marketing, took us through Puma, which is the platform that AMD launched a few weeks back. Puma is a notebook platform, and notebooks are where there's still a huge amount of growth – notebooks sales are projected to eclipse desktop sales this year. AMD's research over the past few years revealed significant growth in consumer use of notebooks for entertainment and gaming. The top three user scenarios amongst consumers are still Web browsing, email, and word processing – but entertainment-focused scenarios are becoming increasingly common. Puma is a platform designed to address the needs of modern consumers, allowing them to get the most out of their notebooks. As a platform, Puma has several important pieces: the AMD Turion CPU, a graphics processor (GPU), a wireless solution, and a few other pieces. ATI's Radeon HD 3200, which is part of the Puma platform, offers a 3x performance boost over a comparable Intel GMA-based system – both chips are integrated, not discrete, which makes this performance boost quite impressive. I've always known that Intel delivered under-powered graphics solutions, but this really cemented it. You won't see integrated GPUs in hardcore gaming laptops, but by raising the bar on the lower end, it enables more gaming scenarios for everyone. Beyond a gaming-graphics boost, HD video was also core focus for the Puma platform – we were shown a slide that outlined the performance improvements that Puma brings to HD playback, and the numbers were impressive. Measured by HQV (an industry-standard visual benchmarking tool), playback of HD video on the Puma platform is sharper and looks better than competing solutions. There's a certain amount of subjectivity involved in saying that something looks better on the Puma platform, but it was pointed out that third-party Web sites have come up with similar results when using HQV on the same AMD chipset found in desktop computers, so the results should stand. ATI has always been known for higher visual fidelity, whereas NVIDIA has typically held the gaming performance crown. CPU usage is much lower with video playback on the Puma platform, which means increased battery life when you're mobile. h.264, MPEG2, and VC1 decoding is supported at the chipset level, which means playback of HD content is smooth. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214884811.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 5: A breakdown of the Turion X2 Ultra processor, which ships as part of the Puma platform. ATI's Hybrid CrossFireX technology is pretty interesting – it's the combination of an integrated graphics chip and a discrete graphics chip working together to render 3D frames. With most notebooks you either get a relatively poorly-performing but battery-friendly integrated GPU, or a high-performance battery-sucking dedicated GPU. CrossFireX is a way to get the best of both worlds: AMD's benchmarks show a 1.7x performance boost when comparing a CrossFireX system (which has both integrated and discrete GPUs) to a discrete NVIDIA 8400M GS. That's no small feat, and means much better 3D performance for gaming. I happen to have an 8400M GS in my Dell XPS M1330 laptop, and knowing what it's capable of, the thought of getting 1.7x more GPU performance is rather compelling! Greater graphics performance usually means less battery life, and ATI PowerXpress Technology handles the power consumption in a smart way: when you're on AC power, it uses the discrete graphics card to give you maximum performance. When you're on battery, it defaults to the integrated graphics. What's interesting to me is that they completely power down the dedicated GPU to the point where it uses zero power, and a CrossFireX laptop would have the same battery life as an identical laptop with integrated graphics. That's impressive because it means choosing a more powerful laptop with discrete graphics puts you on the same battery-life footing as the lower-end laptop – and that's something that no other platform can offer at the moment. Want to override this setting and run the discrete GPU at full-bore while on battery life? Most Puma-based laptops will have a hardware toggle button to allow exactly that. Slick. NVIDIA-based solutions implemented by Sony typically require a reboot to accomplish the same thing (though Xavier from Notebooks.com tells me that's going to change next month). What's Up Next: Shrike Matt Mazzantini , Senior Product Marketing Manager - AMD Notebook Product Marketing, took us through Shrike. Shrike is the first implementation of the AMD Fusion processor that I was told about in January 2007 – and if memory serves, they're pretty much on schedule. Creating a fusion processor, which involves putting multiple CPU cores and a single GPU core on the same piece of silicon is a feat that AMD is uniquely suited to deliver since their acquisition of ATI a few years back. Shrike will put the DDR3 memory controller, two CPU cores, a GPU core, a PCIe controller, a display controller, and the northbridge chipset all on the same piece of silicon. Collectively, the CPU + GPU is called "Swift", an accelerated processing unit (APU). I was a bit confused when they first tossed out this term, because I thought they were saying there was an additional chip on the board to accelerate certain functions (h.2.64 encoding anyone?) but it turns out APU is just a marketing term to indicate the multi-chip silicon. So what improvements will a Fusion processor bring to the table? Up to 20% CPU performance improvement (presumably at the same clock speed), up to 35% GPU performance improvement, and six-plus hours of battery life. Shrike will be AMD's first step into the ultra-portable, ultra-thin notebooks (sub one inch thick devices) and UMPCs. I believe the CPU and GPU improvements, but I'll believe the battery life numbers when I see them myself – AMD mobile CPUs use up about a third of the total power consumption on a laptop, and I doubt integrated graphics uses anywhere near that much, so I'm not sure if combining everything into one piece of silicon will save enough power to take the average 2-3 hour notebook to six hours. It could be that AMD is betting on being able to implement other technologies on their reference designs for Shrike-based notebooks – if the prices on solid state drives drop dramatically in the next 18 months, and OLED screens finally become a reality on notebooks, we might see middle of the road laptops ($1000 and under) getting six hours of battery life. Call me a pessimist, but I never believe battery life claims until I see proof. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214884877.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 6: Walking through Shrike with Matt Mazzantini. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214885063.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 7: The new markets that Shrike will open up for AMD. Today, most AMD-based notebooks are in the 35 watt power range, meaning middle of the market – they don't really have anything in the super-thin or super-performance type of products. They're clearly behind Intel in this area. Shrike will expand the product reach by reaching upward in performance (43 watt TDP) and downward into the ultra-portable realm with 19 watt TDP products. The mid-range will be in the 30 watt TDP. Shrike is not a VIA or Atom competitor – AMD representatives were quick to point that out. Given the number of ultra-small notebooks I'm seeing come to market with Intel Atom and VIA, that would seem to be a problem for AMD if they have nothing to compete in this space. If the best AMD can do is a 19 watt CPU, I don't know how many UMPCs and netbook-style devices will be running AMD. On the other hand, a high-performance 19 watt CPU could work well in a super-thin notebook. How long do we have to wait for Shrike? We should see Shrike-based notebooks in the latter half of 2009 – which doesn't seem that far away. <PAGE /> Accelerated Computing: Looking Toward the Future Hal Speed, Senior Product Marketing Manager - Marketing Architect, talked to us about accelerated computing, which is a future-looking effort focused on determining where AMD should be prioritizing their efforts five-plus years from now. Some of the concepts that Speed explored included: <ul> <li>Moore's Law: still climbing. We're still seeing the number of transistors double every 18 months, but now they're split among multiple cores. </li> <li>The Power Wall: slowly dropping power requirements are giving us slightly better battery life on notebooks, but it's not a quick improvement by any means. </li> <li>The Frequency Wall: very slowly dropping, we're seeing clock speeds inch upward, but nowhere near the hay-day of processors where we saw speeds go from 1 Ghz to 3 Ghz in the span of less than two years. </li> <li>Amdahl's Law: throwing cores at the problem has limits. </li></ul>Amdahl's Law in particular bears more explaining. If software was fully parallelized (meaning everything was able to run in multiple threads, without limit) then performance would scale in a linear fashion based on how many cores you have. Moving from four to eight cores would give you double the performance for instance. The problem is that the bulk of general computing isn't highly parallelized – games are pretty good about using multiple threads, but not much else is. My experiences in my "To Quad or Not To Quad" article certainly bears that statement out. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214885159.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 8: Hal Speed discussing Amdahl's Law. The green line is performance scaling upward with the number of cores applied to computing - but only if the software in question can take advantage of all the cores. Still, there are performance gains to be had past two cores, even if the performance gains are largely in the realm of system responsiveness when multi-tasking. AMD's Speed seemed to be saying that going past two cores on a mobile processor doesn't make sense (if I read between the lines correctly), but I disagree. I have to believe that five years from now we'll see a far greater number of software applications that can take advantage of multiple cores, and even if that isn't the case, the performance gains at four and eight cores are real enough to warrant pursuing them – keeping the power consumption under control of course. When you get past eight cores, however, the performance trend becomes less compelling. Looking toward the future in terms of platforms, "Torrenza" is AMD's code-name for slot or socket computing. The basic idea is that you'd have something similar to the Shrike platform (with the CPU and GPU on the same silicon) but also have slots on the motherboard for further silicon chips to accelerate specific computing tasks. Two examples given were HTX accelerators and PCIe accelerators, both of which are a mystery to me (anyone know what HTX stands for, or why the PCI Express bus would need accelerating?). I could see h.264 encoding accelerators though, perhaps a physics accelerator for a gaming laptop, etc. Digital Media & Entertainment AMD loves artists. Artists love AMD. That's pretty much the gist of this session. Charlie Boswell, the Director of Corporate Initiatives - Chief Media and Entertainment Strategist for AMD Worldwide (how DOES that fit on a business card?), talked about AMD working with the likes of George Lucas, with AMD CPUs powering the pre-visualization workstations that his team used to create storyboard animatics before filming starts. Boswell said that when doing pre-visualization for Star Wars II, Lucas met with his team once a week – because it took a week to render the animatics. When working on Star Wars III, using AMD-powered workstations, the animatics team was able to show Lucas daily progressions of the scene. Bosswell also talked about how involved AMD is in audio recording, both live and in the studio. He name-dropped a bunch of artists that most people would recognize: Eric Clapton, Mark Knoppfler, and others. In all cases the superiority of the AMD platform for content creation was stressed, though without much in the way of technical details explaining why that was. <img border="1" alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1214885251.usr1.jpg" /> Figure 9: A slide showing AMD's eight year investment in the digital media and entertainment space. The cynical among you might view all of this as marketing hype, and to some extent that's true: as a content creator myself (photos and video), I want to get the most speed possible out of my CPU, and right now the Intel Core 2 Duo offers performance that AMD generally can't match. Especially in the mobile realm, AMD CPUs tend to be in the mid-range laptops. Any high-end laptop geared toward performance tends to be based around an Intel Core 2 CPU, so as a consumer even if I preferred AMD CPUs I'd have a hard time finding one in the laptop I wanted. In the desktop realm, especially for anyone who wants to overclock, Intel's Core 2 CPU is the king of the hill. When I'm rendering a video to h.264, I want it to happen as quickly as possible, and there are certainly a large number of professional music studios using Intel-based Macs and PCs, so it's not like an AMD processor is required for audio and video work. Performance metrics aside, I will say that I personally admire AMD's willingness to get involved with content creators: they stressed that no one gets between them and the artists, and they put in a tremendous amount of sweat equity to make AMD solutions work great for the artists. The goal, of course, being to turn that artist into an evangelist for AMD solutions. It's great to see a company that works that hard for their customers. And that was it for our morning sessions. <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/89779/amd-tech-day-afternoon-sessions.html">Check out part two</a>, which covers the afternoon sessions and the all-you-can-eat Texas BBQ that AMD treated us to. Mmm. BBQ. Jason Dunn owns and operates <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He loves any form of BBQ'd animal flesh.